New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie said Tuesday in Tampa, “I don’t want my children and grandchildren to have to read in a history book what it was like to live in an American century.” This is an accurate summary of the stakes of the 2012 election. Voters in November won’t simply determine who will lead the country for the next four years. It’s a choice between two fundamentally different future countries.

The vision presented by speakers at the Republican National Convention in Tampa was traditionally American, of an opportunity society in which hard work and success are rewarded, not punished. It’s a country in which economic growth is based on the efforts of millions of individuals unhampered by countless, minute and maddening government controls. The slogan “We built this” is more than just a dig at Barack Obama’s infamous gaffe; it’s a true reflection of the spirit that transformed the United States from a sleepy wilderness to the greatest economic power in human history.

This is in contrast to the revolutionary agenda being implemented by the Obama administration of an economy controlled and directed by Washington. It’s a country in which bureaucrats in every federal department seek new ways to deepen and expand their influence on the everyday lives of citizens. It’s an entitlement society in which there is no shame in going on the public dole. To the White House, having record numbers of people on food stamps isn’t an alarming indicant of an economy that’s severely off track but a point of pride for a president who touts it as proof that he cares.

This election is about the nature of citizenship. Republicans seek to reform the immigration system to allow people to earn the right to become Americans by demonstrating loyalty to the nation and willingness to contribute to the common good. President Obama has made it easier for illegal aliens to enter the country, hampered state efforts to block them, extended unprecedented access to public assistance and encouraged border jumpers by calling them Americans “in their heart, in their minds, in every single way but one: on paper.”

National identity and the nature of the individual are on the line. Conservatives want to unite Americans behind a common vision of equal opportunity, but the liberal power base sustains itself through promoting social divisions based on race, class, sex, sexual preference and religion. Where Republicans see cooperative communities, Democrats promote tribal conflicts.

The stakes couldn’t be higher in the 2012 presidential campaign. No election in modern times has presented so stark a choice. This will be the year that will determine whether people can speak of American greatness in the future tense or only as a faded moment from the past.

If he becomes president he will not be known as the "Great Connecter". He may be known for a lot of other things, but that's not what he does. But I thought he did try to the best of his ability, and I thought it worked out rather affectingly--the sort of very plain-spoken, prosaic review of his life--yet not trying to go over all those wonderful stories, leaving that to others.

I don't think he had a high bar that he had to meet because of how badly he's been portrayed. I found the entire speech a very interesting combination of deeply personal and yet intensely nationalist.

I thought the importance of that line--about Obama being concerned about the globe and the oceans--and then Romney saying "I'm going to be concerned about you." Obama lives on the moon, Obama's the citizen of the world--as he proclaimed himself in that speech he gave in Berlin in 2007--and he [Romney] says "I'm your president, this is a unique country. We're not interested in that. We're not going to go abroad and apologize."

And those lines, the foreign policy lines--in an election that is overwhelmingly about the economy--got the most applause and the most energy from the crowd, because he was saying one thing: Obama has not succeeded, and he has failed--not just you and your family--but the nation. Because an America this stagnant is not one that we understand and not one that we can be.

Thursday, August 30, 2012

Speaking to veterans at the American Legion conference this week, President Obama said, “Today, every American can be proud that the United States is safer, stronger and more respected in the world.”
That’s quite a statement from a President who has granted legitimacy to extremist organizations like the Muslim Brotherhood and promised the Russians he would be “flexible” toward their demands on missile defense, while slighting American allies like Poland and the Czech Republic.
Heritage defense experts call Obama’s defense strategy “a strategy of hope“: “a hope that big wars are a thing of the past; a hope that America’s allies will do more; and a hope that fewer resources do not jeopardize the lives of American soldiers.”
These are flimsy hopes in the face of hostile nations and terrorist groups that want nothing more than the destruction of America.
If we do not reverse course—strengthening our military instead of gutting it, providing true security for our allies, and getting real about the groups that want us dead—the cost will be American lives.
The Administration has made a lot of noise about “pivoting” America’s security focus toward Asia. It is a vital region, but Obama’s policies of cutting the size of the military are the opposite of what we need to secure the country’s interests around the world. Heritage’s Bruce Klingner and Dean Cheng explain:
A smaller Navy, Air Force, Army, and Marine Corps means a reduced U.S. presence overseas and, due to an even higher operational tempo, a greater strain on existing forces and equipment. Underfunding defense requirements could restrict potential U.S. policy options and increase the danger to U.S. forces during any future Asian engagements. And, ultimately, the price of such underfunding will be mission failure or American servicemen’s lives.
Though Asia is important, the American homeland is still a target for terrorists, and terrorists are still training in the Middle East. Heritage’s James Carafano has warned that “President Obama’s determination to pull out from Afghanistan means the U.S. will leave the field with the enemy still standing.” While al-Qaeda affiliates in Iraq are continuing violence daily, Carafano says that in Afghanistan, “after the American withdrawal, the Taliban may well sweep back and re-establish control of parts of Afghanistan. Al Qaeda could well follow, even as it continues to build up bases of operations elsewhere, particularly in the Middle East and North Africa.”
As it stands now, America faces these threats with a military that is being hollowed out. Terrorists continue to try attacking us here at home. Our leaders must make defending America a priority and commit the resources to meet its challenges both at home and abroad.
As Carafano put it, “A belligerently aggressive Iran…an anti-democratic Russia…an expansive China…a wet-behind-the-ears ‘Dear Leader’ in North Korea…enduring threats from narco-terrorists and Islamist terrorists…there is every sign that, when Obama’s four years are up, the world will be a potentially far more dangerous place than it was when he first took office.”

As our nation enters the final two months of another spirited election, Republican Senate candidates are on offense in states Democrats won in 2006. A record of broken promises coupled with an unprecedented attempt to push through an extreme liberal agenda has put Democrats in the unenviable position of being forced to play defense and facing daunting odds in areas where just a few short years ago they cruised to victory.
Democrats including Jon Tester of Montana, Bill Nelson of Florida and Sherrod Brown of Ohio find themselves on defense because they promised to be independent voices for their constituents while committing to support a balanced approach to managing our country’s finances. Instead, they have amassed voting records that consistently side with President Obama and his far-left agenda, which includes passing a $800-plus billion stimulus program that has not helped our economy create the jobs Americans desperately need. The stimulus was found to be filled with unnecessary and wasteful spending that simply helped feed the appetites of spend-hungry lawmakers.
Senate Democrats also are struggling to explain why they have endorsed harmful environmental regulations that are hurting our nation’s energy producers. From the infamous cap-and-trade legislation to new Environmental Protection Agency rules to killing the Keystone XL pipeline, they have allowed this administration to run roughshod over businesses seeking to help lessen our dependence on foreign oil.
Perhaps the biggest question for Senate Democrats today is why they provided key votes to ram through a government takeover of our health care system. Before forcing Obamacare through Congress, Senate Democrats promised it would help lower health care costs, reduce the deficit and ease the burden on working families. Independent experts say Obamacare will increase the cost of health care by thousands of dollars per family and is slated to cost more than $1 trillion. This summer, the Supreme Court labeled it a massive tax on the American people.

Shortly after Paul Ryan’s speech ended last night, the left wing blogosphere and commentariat launched an attack on the vice presidential nominee for his supposed mendacity. They attacked from many angles, but the most substantial assault was on Medicare.

This is a complicated issue, and it is important for the facts of the situation to be laid bare for all to see, unvarnished and plain.

Last night, Paul Ryan said this about Medicare:

"And the biggest, coldest power play of all in Obama Care came at the expense of the elderly. You see, even with all the hidden taxes to pay for the health care takeover, even with the new law and new taxes on nearly a million small businesses, the planners in Washington still didn't have enough money; they needed more. They needed hundreds of billions more. So they just took it all away from Medicare, $716 billion funneled out of Medicare by President Obama."

This is an entirely true statement. In fact, some have been suggesting for years that the Democrats would pay a dear price for their raid on Medicare. And the time has come to pony up.

An economy cannot long remain prosperous by government's taxing and spending more, now absorbing national output at a rate equal to the entire income of every American living west of the Mississippi. If this trend continues, America will gradually sink into the status of a Third World nation -- more unemployment, more shackles on production, more poverty."
-- John Hospers
(1918- ) Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Southern California, author

Wednesday, August 29, 2012

“We are on strike against self-immolation. We are on strike against the creed of unearned rewards and unrewarded duties. We are on strike against the dogma that the pursuit of one's happiness is evil. We are on strike against the doctrine that life is guilt.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

President Barack Obama has such ill-advised contempt for the intelligence of American taxpayers that he has become an habitual liar when talking about his plans to deal with a national debt that will imminently top $16 trillion.

For example, on Aug. 14, he told a crowd in Waterloo, Iowa: "I'll make sure government still does its part to reduce our debt and our deficits. We've cut out already a trillion dollars' worth of spending we don't need."

On June 22, in Tampa, Fla., he said: "We're going to reduce our deficit by $4 trillion. I have a detailed plan. We'll cut spending we can't afford."

On June 12, in Philadelphia, he said: "And I've already signed $2 trillion of cuts into law already and have proposed $2 trillion in additional deficit reduction."

So, which is it?

Did Obama already cut spending by a trillion, or does he plan to cut the deficit by $4 trillion, or did he already sign legislation to cut it by $2 trillion and plans to cut it by $2 trillion more?

Tampa
There are two big obstacles standing between Mitt Romney and the presidency: (1) Voters don't think he's very likable compared to Obama, and (2) although he has a lead over Obama on the issue of the economy--and even bigger lead on the deficit--voters seem uncertain that Romney would do what it will take to fix the economy and rein in spending. New Jersey governor Chris Christie sought to help Romney overcome both of these obstacles during his keynote address at the Republican National Convention on Tuesday night. Christie framed the election as a contest of ideas, rather than a popularity contest, and he cast Romney as a bold reformer who would achieve for the country what Christie achieved for New Jersey.

At the beginning of his speech, Christie recounted how his Sicilian mother had taught him that "there would be times in your life when you have to choose between being loved and being respected. She said to always pick being respected, that love without respect was always fleeting -- but that respect could grow into real, lasting love."

"I believe we have become paralyzed by our desire to be loved," Christie explained. "Our leaders today have decided it is more important to be popular, to do what is easy and say 'yes,' rather than to say no when 'no' is what's required."

Christie didn't mention Obama by name. He deftly attacked Obama by simply lumping him together with other nameless failed politicians who had chosen popularity over leadership. That made Obama seem quite small.

Christie talked about the success achieved in New Jersey over the past three years--tax cuts, a balanced budget, pension reform, and education reform. He then drew sharp contrasts between Republicans and Democrats on big issues at the federal level.

If Chris Christie lit a fire under Republicans last night, it's now up to Paul Ryan to provide the fuel to keep it burning for what promises to be a hard-fought two-month battle to win the White House.

The Republican vice presidential candidate is teed up Wednesday to deliver the "hard truths" Christie talked about in his rousing keynote address on opening night. While Christie is known as the GOP fighter, Ryan is the point-man for budget-balancing solutions the party claims to represent.

The Wisconsin congressman has been quietly preparing his speech for days. Members of Ryan's staff contacted by Fox News earlier this week said they couldn't say precisely how long it would be, but that he has "teased" some of the ideas in it before.

Ryan, chairman of the House Budget Committee, is best known for his controversial plans to overhaul Medicare and the tax system. They are likely the kinds of "hard truths" Christie raised Tuesday night, as the New Jersey governor claimed Mitt Romney and Ryan would lead a "new era of truth-telling" in Washington.

"We ended an era of absentee leadership without purpose or principle in New Jersey," Christie said, relating his own experiences fighting the teachers unions and other interests in the Garden State. "It is time to end this era of absentee leadership in the Oval Office and send real leaders back to the White House.

"America needs Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan, and we need them right now," Christie declared.

Ryan will also accept the Republican vice presidential nomination Wednesday night, all while setting the stage for Romney's address on the closing day.

Democrats, though, were hard at work casting Ryan as a regressive choice for the country. A new video released Wednesday by the Obama campaign cast him as "out of step" with voters, and someone from a "bygone era."

The video criticizes Ryan for being the architect of an "extreme" budget that would overhaul Medicare and for seeking to defund Planned Parenthood.

Ryan spokesman Brendan Buck said the video was a "tired and misleading" attack by Obama "in an attempt to divert attention away from his failed record."

Obama, meanwhile, is traveling Wednesday to Charlottesville, Va., the last stop on his two-day trip to counter the GOP convention message and to appeal to younger voters in college towns.

Both parties were pushing forward with their political plans while closely monitoring Hurricane Isaac, which arrived in Louisiana late Tuesday. Republicans had largely canceled the first day of their convention as Isaac appeared bound for Tampa. White House officials said they were monitoring the storm but, as of early Wednesday, had no plans to adjust the president's travel plans.

The GOP convention's opening day was raucous, with a string of fiery speeches -- and one deeply personal address from Ann Romney.

Christie was as tough on Obama as he was supportive of Mitt Romney, ratcheting up the convention tone. Christie claimed "doubt and fear" have seized a country that four years ago put its stock in hope and change.

Christie said Romney will "tell us the truth" and "lead with conviction" and that, in the end, the country will thrive "in a second American century."

"If you're willing to hear the truth ... about the hard road ahead, and the rewards for America that truth will bear, I'm here to begin with you this new era of truth-telling," Christie said.

Warming up the crowd for Ryan Wednesday is another high-profile roster of Republican names. The list includes former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Kentucky

Though he was a pariah four years ago, his fierce defense of liberty, fiscal conservatism and containment of the federal government guided every campaign in the endless and tumbling Republican primary at least to some degree. Mitt Romney’s announcement this week that he supports auditing the Federal Reserve is but the latest example of Mr. Paul’s fingerprints.

But it is another Paul who deserves nearly as much credit for shaping the current Republican campaign in regards to both politics and policy. That would be Paul Ryan.

For years ensconced in boring House committee and subcommittee hearings, Mr. Ryan has toiled away in his nerdy, earnest manner running the numbers every conceivable way and arriving at very sobering conclusions about the future of voters’ most beloved entitlement programs.

If you listen to America's political hacks, mainstream media talking heads and their socialist allies, you can't help but reach the conclusion that the nation's tax burden is borne by the poor and middle class while the rich get off scot-free.

Stephen Moore, senior economics writer for the Wall Street Journal (and, I'm proud to say, former George Mason University economics student) wrote "The U.S. Tax System: Who Really Pays?" in the Manhattan Institute's Issues 2012. Let's see whether the rich are paying their "fair" share.

According to 2007 Internal Revenue Service data, the richest 1 percent of Americans earned 22 percent of national personal income but paid 40 percent of all personal income taxes. The top 5 percent earned 37 percent and paid 61 percent of personal income tax. The top 10 percent earned 48 percent and paid 71 percent of all personal income taxes. The bottom 50 percent earned 12 percent of personal income but paid just 3 percent of income tax revenues.

New Jersey Governor and Republican keynote speaker Chris Christie had to combat and correct several of his hosts’ liberal assumptions on CBS This Morning on Tuesday. CBS’s Norah O’Donnell had trouble grasping that Mitt Romney’s plan for tax simplification included lower overall tax rates, but not necessarily a lower tax burden on wealthy individuals.

Three times, O’Donnell claimed to Christie that Romney would cut taxes for the rich: “ He says he's going to cut everybody's tax rates by 20%... He said he will cut everybody’s taxes by 20%...So, he will cut the wealthiest Americans' taxes?”

President Obama’s casting of Mitt Romney as extreme is one of the most glaring incidents of political projection in the modern era. Romney doesn’t approach extremism in substance, style or disposition. Obama swims in it

TAMPA, Fla. — Larry Kudlow, host of “The Kudlow Report” on CNBC, warned of a recession if current tax rates for all income brackets expire and the planned automatic spending cuts take effect.

He also told The Daily Caller that President Barack Obama would rather “punish” the wealthy than deal with America’s current economic challenges.

“I really think the fiscal cliff, which is really a tax cliff — it’s a tax-hike cliff — depends on the election. I mean, I think that the [Congressional Budget Office] CBO is right: If we don’t fix it, we’re going to have a recession. At the moment, I see no effort by Obama to deal with it. I mean, if I were he, and I were running in a close race, honest to God, I would call people together and sit down and hammer out a deal right away and you know what? That could possibly win the election for him. But he shows no evidence, no inclination to do that,” Kudlow told TheDC in Tampa after speaking at “Newt University” — a public policy forum sponsored by former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich during the Republican National Convention.

“All he wants to do is bash rich people and bash businesses. It’s crazy to me. So I think that, I think that if Romney wins, I take, Ryan told me this Thursday, the first order of business is going to be to fix the fiscal cliff and avoid the recession. And I hope to hell that’s right. We can’t, I mean — here’s the deal: After what we’ve been through with this awful recession and this awful recovery, I personally do not believe this country can take another recession.”

Kudlow said another recessing would be “devastating” in “psychological terms” for the country.

“Our enemies around the world would just lick their chops if America stumbles again, and that bothers me a lot,” Kudlow said, specifically citing Russia, China and Iran.

He also opposes Obama’s call to only extend the current Bush-era tax rates for families making under $250,000 per year.

In what passes for good news about the U.S. economy these days, the government on Wednesday is expected to revise upward the broad measure of growth known as gross domestic product. If forecasts hold up, the GDP report will show that the nation's economy expanded at a rate of 1.7 percent in the second quarter of 2012, up from a previous estimate of 1.5 percent.

Statisticians may celebrate the economy growing at a slightly-less-mediocre pace. On Main Street, though, everyone knows that prosperity is running way behind what's normally expected in any recovery worthy of the name.

This is, by many measures, the feeblest economic recovery since the Great Depression. Most economists expect the malaise to continue into 2013. Remember, we're talking about a disturbingly poky recovery from a recession that ended in ... June 2009. Yes, 38 months ago.

To some extent, the sluggish results reflect the lingering effects of that downturn. Consumers got hammered through layoffs and a housing bust. The financial system froze, and businesses stopped investing, even after their profits recovered. Government ordered banks to recapitalize and poured on monetary and fiscal stimulus. That was a predictable response, and we generally supported it.

What's maddening is the self-inflicted damage caused by subsequent inaction in Washington once the crisis subsided. Gridlock on Capitol Hill has created unnecessary uncertainty for employers, for households, for everyone: It has increased risks for businesses that don't know what the tax and investment rules will be. It has discouraged spending by consumers who worry that the continued high unemployment rate could, in any given week, bite them, too. And while it is difficult to measure these impacts with precision, the cumulative consequences for confidence among job creators, investors and consumers have been huge. Week after week, fresh economic numbers attest to the torpor.

The Democratic National Committee is raising a number of eyebrows after choosing to proceed with hosting Islamic “Jumah” prayers for two hours on the Friday of its convention, though it denied a Catholic cardinal’s request to say a prayer at the same event.

Monday, August 27, 2012

What a Real Jobs Program Would Have Looked Like:
Unemployment is the millstone around President Obama’s neck in the 2012 election campaign. Attentive voters understand he is offering excuses — a worse-than-expected economy, financial crises requiring longer recoveries, bad luck of tsunamis, droughts, and the Euro — not solutions. Obama cannot deliver solutions because a real jobs program contradicts his core principles, alienates his base, and infuriates his crony contributors. He can only promise more of the failed policies –stimulus and tinkering — of his first three and a half years.

Obama’s last foray into job creation was his American Jobs Act (AJA) submitted to Congress on September 12, 2011. Labeled “Stimulus 2” by its critics, Obama’s shopworn list of remedies, promised to “put more people back to work and put more money in the pockets of working Americans….without adding a dime to the deficit.” The AJA’s temporary tax credits to businesses that hire, extension of the payroll tax holiday, and more money for teachers and infrastructure stalled in both Houses and had to be taken up piecemeal. The payroll tax holiday extension passed Congress. Small businesses decided his tax credits for hiring were not worth the trouble.

What do American military veterans believe is the greatest threat to our nation’s security? If you think the answer is China, the Iranian nuclear threat, or foreign terrorist groups, guess again: Nearly three-quarters of veterans we surveyed last month cite economic weakness (42 percent) and the national debt (30 percent) as the top threats to national security.

As policymakers in Washington wrestle with historic budget deficits — and candidates hit the stump with plans to jumpstart the economy — they should keep these results in mind.

Veterans are often assumed to be a monolith, focused narrowly on VA health and retirement benefits. They’re not. Our military and veterans — having sworn an oath to defend the Constitution — have a keen eye towards all threats to our nation’s future, foreign and domestic. They know that our nation’s military might and inherent freedoms are inextricably tied to our economic health.

Next week, the national debt will surpass $16 trillion — a historic high and new low. Each day it grows by roughly $3.5 billion, and in a matter of years, interest payments on our debt will exceed defense outlays. Worse yet, at 104 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product, the debt is now larger than the American economy; and this year marks the fourth consecutive year with a $1 trillion budget shortfall. We’re underwater, yet there seems to be no relief in sight, with deficits forecast as far as the eye can see.

CHRIS HAYES, host of MSNBC's "Up with Chris Hayes", said on air this past weekend, "It is undeniably the case that racist Americans are almost entirely in one political coalition and not the other", by which he means most American racists lean right, not left. This has since been proven false by Alex Tabarrok, an economist at George Mason University, and John Sides, a political scientist at George Washington University, both of whom have denied Mr Hayes' contention, persuasively.

identification with the Democratic Party tends to decline, and identification with the Republican party tends to increase, as attitudes toward black become less favorable—at least when attitudes are measured with two different racial stereotypes. However, the relationship is far from deterministic: substantial minorities of those with unfavorable attitudes toward blacks identify as Democrats.

So Mr Hayes is quite wrong. At best, Republicans on the whole are slightly more likely to have opinions commonly believed to be racist, and that is far from undeniabl

CHRIS HAYES, host of MSNBC's "Up with Chris Hayes", said on air this past weekend, "It is undeniably the case that racist Americans are almost entirely in one political coalition and not the other", by which he means most American racists lean right, not left. This has since been proven false by Alex Tabarrok, an economist at George Mason University, and John Sides, a political scientist at George Washington University, both of whom have denied Mr Hayes' contention, persuasively.

identification with the Democratic Party tends to decline, and identification with the Republican party tends to increase, as attitudes toward black become less favorable—at least when attitudes are measured with two different racial stereotypes. However, the relationship is far from deterministic: substantial minorities of those with unfavorable attitudes toward blacks identify as Democrats.

So Mr Hayes is quite wrong. At best, Republicans on the whole are slightly more likely to have opinions commonly believed to be racist, and that is far from undeniabl

To see how the base of the Republican Party has changed over the years, compare two presidential elections, 1944 and 1988. In both, the winning candidate was the nominee of the party that had long held the White House—for three terms by 1944 and for two terms by 1988. The winning candidate in both cases found his strongest regional support in the South; his second-strongest region was the West. Both times, the winning candidate narrowly carried all but one of the large Eastern and Midwestern states—New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Illinois.

One thing was different. The winner in 1944 was a Democrat, Franklin Roosevelt. The winner in 1988 was a Republican, George H.W. Bush.

There have been further changes in the Republican Party vote since 1988. George H.W. Bush won by large margins in affluent suburban counties. To take one example, Mr. Bush won 61% of the vote in the four suburban counties outside Philadelphia—Bucks, Chester, Delaware and Montgomery—and carried Pennsylvania. More recently, affluent suburbs outside the South—showing a distaste for cultural conservatism and for the increasingly Southern accent of the Republican Party—have trended Democratic. In 2008, Barack Obama won 57% in these four counties outside Philadelphia, and he carried Pennsylvania.

By contrast, the senior Bush got whipped in West Virginia, one of only 10 states he lost in 1988. He also trailed in the steel and coal country from western Pennsylvania and southeastern Ohio running down to eastern Kentucky and southwest Virginia. But in 2008, voters there turned up their noses at Barack Obama. He lost not only West Virginia but also Kentucky, Tennessee and Arkansas, all of which were carried twice by his fellow Democrat Bill Clinton.

Sunday, August 26, 2012

"To take from one, because it is thought that his own industry and that of his fathers has acquired too much, in order to spare others, who, or whose fathers have not exercised equal industry and skill, is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association, 'the guarantee to every one of a free exercise of his industry, and the fruits acquired by it.'"
~ Thomas Jefferson

(CNSNews.com) - According to the Gallup tracking poll of the presidential race, there is a gender gap in the candidates' appeal: Men are more likely to favor Republican candidate Mitt Romney and women are more likely to favor Democratic candidate Barack Obama--by the exact same percentages.

In Gallup's tracking between July 30 and August 19, 50 percent of male registered voters said they supported Romney and 42 percent said they supported Obama. At the same time, 50 percent of female registered voters said they supported Obama and 42 percent said they supported Romney.

Former Mass. Gov. Mitt Romney and Ann Romney (AP Photo/Jim Cole)

The Gallup poll showed a similar, but larger disparity, between married and unmarried registered votes. Among those who were married, Romney led Obama 55 to 37. Among those were not married, Obama led Romney, 57 to 34.

Overall, the same Gallup poll showed Obama and Romney tied at 46 percent each among registered voters.

The Gallup survey was based on interviews with 9,678 registered voters.

As Republicans take the stage in Tampa, we have a message for Americans: Elect Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan, and we can get this country working again. America can do better than the last four years, and with the proven leadership of Mr. Romney and Mr. Ryan, we can secure a better future for the country and the next generation.
Our convention is an opportunity to share our vision with the country. “A Better Future” is the theme of the four-day event. It’s also more than that. It is a promise to voters. While President Obama has no plan to fix the economy or rein in government spending, Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan have a plan and will be prepared to lead on Day One.
When Mr. Obama was elected in 2008, he was inexperienced and unproven. Americans were willing to take a risk, but it turned out to be a bad bet. He was not up to the job, as the weak economy and skyrocketing debt so unambiguously demonstrate.

Read more: PRIEBUS: A convention and candidate for a better future - Washington Times

Saturday, August 25, 2012

Republicans gather in Tampa on Monday for their nominating convention. These quadrennial gatherings lack their historical drama, and in 2012 the outcome is assured. Former Gov. Mitt Romney and Rep. Paul Ryan will be the party’s nominees for president and vice president, the “brokered convention” fantasy scenarios notwithstanding. Some curmudgeons believe the primary system and the pace of modern politics have rendered stately, long-form conventions unnecessary, but these spectacles still play an important symbolic role in setting the stage for the final push out on the hustings.
The GOP ticket will stick to the script that’s been developed over the past months and weeks, indicting the Obama administration’s failure to deliver on the promises of future prosperity Democrats made in 2008. Jobs haven’t been created; economic growth hasn’t rebounded; personal incomes have fallen more in the last three years than in any postwar recovery period; and the Congressional Budget Office is predicting another sharp economic contraction ahead. The Republican appeal reaches beyond party ranks. Many independents who joined candidate Barack Obama chanting “Yes we can!” in 2008 are now asking, “Well, why didn’t you?”

Long before Missouri Republican Senate candidate Todd Akin flapped his gums about the female body’s magical ability to prevent pregnancy in the case of “legitimate rape,” Democrats were conducting an aggressive campaign to cast Mitt Romney as an extremist on social issues.

First, the Obama campaign claimed in the spring that Romney was waging a “war on women” by opposing Obamacare’s contraception and abortifacient mandate. Romney would “deny women access to birth control,” the Obama campaign claimed, as if an employer’s failure to provide a free lunch would amount to “denying workers access to food.”

In July, the Obama campaign launched a television ad claiming that “Romney backed a law that outlaws all abortion, even in cases of rape and incest.” The ad was blatantly false. Since his pro-life conversion, Romney’s official position has always been that there should be exceptions in cases of rape, incest, and when the mother’s life is endangered. Even PolitiFact, the left-leaning “fact checking” website, declared the Obama ad was a “Pants on Fire” lie.

Median household income losses between June 2009 and June 2012 occurred for nearly every conceivable demographic group. Family households lost 4.7 percent. Nonfamily households (i.e., people who live alone) lost 7.5 percent. Men who live alone did very badly; they lost 9.4 percent. Households headed by African-Americans did even worse; they lost 11.1 percent. Married-couple households weathered the, um, recovery better than others, but still lost 3.6 percent. Weirdly, two-earner households lost more income (5.9 percent) than one-earner households (4 percent), perhaps because they started out with more income to lose. Households headed by full-time workers lost 5.1 percent. Households headed by private-sector workers lost 4.5 percent, while households headed by government workers lost 3.5 percent.

Income losses occurred at all levels of educational attainment. The steepest losses were for those with “some college, no degree”; they lost 9.3 percent, followed by people with associate’s degrees (8.6 percent), high school grads (6.9 percent), people with bachelor’s degrees or more (5.9 percent), and high school dropouts (5.3 percent). High school dropouts lost the least because they never had much to lose.

Saying they are fed up with being told that they can’t do their jobs, 10 immigration agents on Thursday sued the Obama administration to try to overturn the president’s new non-deportation policy.
The lawsuit, filed in a federal court in Texas, adds a legal controversy to the political fight that has been brewing over President Obama’s immigration policies, which have steadily narrowed the range of immigrants whom the government is targeting for deportation.
The 10 U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents and deportation officers said Mr. Obama’s policies force them to choose between enforcing the law and being reprimanded by superiors, or listening to superiors and violating their own oaths of office and a 1996 law that requires them to put those who entered the country illegally into deportation proceedings.

One major misconception is that Rand worshipped the rich and saw moneymaking as life’s highest goal. In fact, most wealthy characters in her novels are pathetic, repulsive, or both: businessmen fattened on shady deals or government perks, society people who fill their empty lives with luxury. (There are also sympathetic poor and working-class characters.)

In The Fountainhead, Rand’s first bestseller (and best novel), the hero, architect Howard Roark, describes “the man whose sole aim is to make money” as a variety of “the second-hander” who lives through others, seeking only to impress with his wealth. Roark himself turns down lucrative jobs rather than sacrifice his artistic integrity, at one point finding himself penniless.

Rand extolled “selfishness,” but not quite in its common meaning. (To some extent, she was using the now-familiar confrontational tactic of turning a slur against a stigmatized group—in this case, true individualists—into a badge of pride.) Roark’s foil, the social-climbing opportunist Peter Keating, gives up both the work and the woman he truly loves for career advancement. Most people, Rand says, would condemn Keating as “selfish”; yet his real problem is lack of self.

To Rand, being “selfish” meant being true to oneself, neither sacrificing one’s own desires nor trampling on others. Likewise, Rand’s stance against altruism was not an assault on compassion so much as a critique of doctrines that subordinate the individual to a collective—state, church, community, or family.

Was Rand’s individualism too radical? Yes. Her hostility to the idea of any moral obligation to others led her to argue that, while helping a friend in need is fine, doing so at the expense of something it hurts you to give up is “immoral.” In her fiction, even private charity as a vocation is despised; so, mostly, is family. Rand made little allowance for the fact that some people cannot help themselves through no fault of theirs, or that much individual achievement is enabled by support networks.

Yet great insights can come from flawed thinkers. Rand’s anti-altruism tirades often turn their target into a straw man, but she is right that the knee-jerk habit of treating altruistic goals as noble has aided evil—for instance, blinding well-meaning Westerners to communism’s monstrosity. When pundits alarmed by Rand-style individualism scoff at the “myth” of individual autonomy, we should remember that this “myth” gave us freedom and human rights, and unleashed creative energies that raised humanity’s welfare to once-unthinkable levels. Rand’s work offers a powerful defense of freedom’s moral foundation—and a perceptive analysis of the kinship between “progressive” and “traditionalist” anti-freedom ideologies.

Rand’s ideas apply to the personal as well as the political. One needn’t go to Randian extremes to agree that the valorization of “sacrifice” and the accusation of “selfishness” can be potent weapons for users, manipulators, and family despots—or that dependency is not the path to healthy relationships. (In Rand’s words, “To say ‘I love you,’ one must first know how to say the ‘I.’ ”) A common critique is that Rand appeals to adolescents who think they’re self-sufficient, special, and destined for great achievement. Yet surely the world would be poorer—materially and spiritually—without people who carry some of that “spirit of youth,” as Rand called it, into adulthood.

Attacks on Rand have also focused on her person, from her disastrous extramarital affair with a much younger protégé to her brief infatuation, at 23, with a notorious killer she described as an “exceptional boy” warped by conformist society. Ugly stuff, to be sure; but plenty of other intellectuals had a sordid personal lives and romanticized murderers as rebels.

Rand is best viewed as a brilliant maverick. But there are reasons this woman attracted hordes of followers, influenced many others, and impressed smart people from journalist Mike Wallace to philosopher John Hospers.

Those who treat Rand as a liberal bogeyman will forever be blindsided by her appeal.
Boston Herald

Thursday, August 23, 2012

By the end of this year, the federal debt is expected to be $16.2 trillion, which is $6.2 trillion more than when President Obama first came into office four years ago. Moreover, new analysis by the Republican side of the Senate Budget Committee finds that, over the next 4 years, if Barack Obama remains president and his budget is enacted, $4.4 trillion will be added to the federal debt.

Because the possibility of effectively supervising government varies inversely with government’s size, so does government’s lawfulness. This iron law of Leviathan is illustrated by a dispiriting story that begins with the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, a.k.a. the stimulus — that supposedly temporary response to an economic emergency.

Because nothing is as immortal as a temporary government program, Communities Putting Prevention to Work (CPPW), a creature of the stimulus, was folded into the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010, a.k.a. Obamacare. And the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), working through the CPPW, disbursed money to 25 states to fight, among other things, the scourge of soda pop.

With 11 weeks until Election Day, President Barack Obama’s desperation couldn’t be plainer. He wants the campaign to be about anything other than his record, starting with the failure of the $787 billion “stimulus” plan to revive the economy and the deeply unpopular, vastly expensive and utterly flawed botch that is Obamacare.

The most substantive remarks about policy the president typically makes are to reinforce his class-warfare themes by talking about his eagerness to let the Bush tax cuts expire on Dec. 31 for single earners making more than $200,000 a year and families making more than $250,000. Obama depicts this as crucial to bringing the immense federal budget deficit under control. His stump speech emphasizes that unless you agree with him, “you’re not serious about deficit reduction.”

But according to FactCheck.org, a nonpartisan research center run by the Annenberg Public Policy Center, the Obama White House itself says that letting income taxes go up for the wealthy and restoring the estate tax to 2009 levels would reduce the projected $1.2 trillion federal deficit for 2012 by less than 9 percent. Remember, these are the president’s own numbers, and they predict average annual additional revenue of $96.8 billion per year over the next decade if he gets his way.

In other words, letting tax breaks for the wealthy expire doesn’t come close to changing the trajectory of trillion-dollar annual deficits that have the U.S. well on its way to federal budgets in which one-quarter of all spending is just to retire interest on the debt. So much for Obama’s February 2009 vow to cut the deficit in half and to take “responsibility right now, in this administration, for getting our spending under control.”

What would change this trajectory? Two things: 1) an overhaul of entitlement programs for the elderly to contain costs; and 2) a reform of the federal tax and regulatory codes that would encourage job growth and unfetter the free-market economy to work its magic.

Guess who used to agree with the first point and partly agree with the second point? Barack Obama.

But now he’s using the time-dishonored Democratic tradition of telling elderly voters that Republicans want them to die and the more specific new tradition of inferring that GOP rival Mitt Romney’s tax reform proposals are motivated by Romney’s desire to cut his own taxes.

This needs to change. We need to have a substantive debate about the deficit, about entitlements, about how to turn the tax code into an economic engine.

But here’s why that won’t happen: If the president took responsibility, right now, for his record – for the gap between his promises and what he’s accomplished – the election would be over.

Instead, the president believes his unpopularity stems from the failures of others. The last president. House Republicans. Voters who can’t figure out how wonderful he’s been.

This list keeps growing. On Aug. 7, The New York Times reported that Obama didn’t care for the mainstream media coverage of him. And on Monday, Politico reported Obama was down on some members of his campaign team and administration over the state of his re-election campaign.

It has been a very rough patch for Our President, and I do believe it is going to get rougher still. Do not be surprised as the month goes on and August runs into September, that his campaign budget becomes tighter. President Obama is spending more money than he is raising. It will get worse. A president who mismanages the federal budget the way Mr. Obama does cannot be expected to manage his campaign budget much better. Lavish spending, it turns out, is a way of life for the community organizer who became our 44th president. The lavish spending on campaign 2012 will be looked back on and seen as one of the campaign’s greatest weaknesses. He can spend the money, but my guess is he will not be able to raise it.
Yet this week, he had other headaches, too. This week, Politico finally reported the dissension and backbiting within the campaign that have been rumored for weeks. You will be hearing a lot about this in the weeks ahead. The magical team that David Axelrod and David Plouffe put together in 2008 is falling apart.
At the American Spectator, we reported years ago that this team was in reality the greenest pack of greenhorns ever assembled to take over a White House. For more than three years, the mainstream media have covered for the Obama galoots. It is a perfect example of the Taranto Principle, by which the mainstream media’s biased reporting only encourages liberal excess. Well, now Mr. Axelrod and Valerie Jarrett and the rest of Mr. Obama’s minor figures who aspired to be major players are at each other’s throats. It will fall to the president to gather them up and lead them to one more term in the White House. Except that as Ron Suskind demonstrated in his excellent book “Confidence Men,” Mr. Obama does not lead. He cannot. He just walked out on another meeting.
There is more. Niall Ferguson dominated the cover of Newsweek to tabulate the carnage that is our economy. He also added up the foreign-policy failures of the administration. It does not look good. Mr. Ferguson rather rudely asked Mr. Obama to “Hit the Road, Barack.” Finally, the president reported that his dog Bo is overweight and will be going on a diet.
So, with all this drear, Our President hastily called a news conference the other day. He has not held one in months. Mr. Obama attempted to say that his charges that Mitt Romney has been responsible for at least one death and is a tax cheat were not outside the “bounds” of presidential discourse. “If you look at the overall trajectory of our campaign,” he said, “and the ads that I’ve approved and are produced by my campaign, you’ll see that we point out sharp differences between the candidates but we don’t go out of bounds.” Actually, if Mr. Romney is responsible for all the misdeeds Mr. Obama has laid to him, he should not be running for president. He should be behind bars.
Lately in Washington, the scurrilous tone of Mr. Obama’s campaign has made even the mainstream media uneasy. They again launch into their false theater about how “both sides do it and oh, woe is us.” They cite the Obama campaign’s claims about the dead woman and Mr. Romney’s taxes. They mention Stephanie Cutter, Mr. Obama’s deputy campaign manager, who charged Mr. Romney with a “felony” for the way he exited his business connection with Bain Capital. Then they bring in their examples of the Republicans’ excesses. Inevitably, they go back to 2004 and the charges that Sen. John F. Kerry, then the Democratic candidate for president, had his war record mangled by Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and other Republican apparatchiks. Though wait! The swift boat veterans spoke the truth. They even relied on taped congressional hearings before which Mr. Kerry charged his fellow combatants with war crimes. His problem was his record in Vietnam, not the swift boat veterans’ allegations. The mainstream media also trot out an allegation about Mr. Romney claiming that the Obama administration is “gutting” welfare. Two Republicans, they say, were among the governors who asked for some sort of waiver on welfare. The Republicans deny it. It is all pretty thin gruel.
Let us come to the point. Mr. Obama is reaching out to his very own special constituency. It is composed of those who believe that the Republicans would put up as their candidate for the presidency a person who in his business life would engage in fraud, tax evasion and even murder. Mr. Obama is casting his net for the moron vote. I do not believe there are enough morons out there to re-elect him.
R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr. is founder and editor-in-chief of the American Spectator and an adjunct scholar at the Hudson Institute. He is the author most recently of “The Death of Liberalism” (Thomas Nelson, 2012).

"T]he powers granted by the proposed Constitution are the gift of the people,
and may be resumed by them when perverted to their oppression,
and every power not granted thereby remains with the people."

Wednesday, August 22, 2012

Let’s face it. In the most optimistic scenario conservatives can imagine for November 6, Mitt Romney defeats Barack Obama by a whopping five points, carrying Ohio, Virginia and Florida by narrow margins. Wow. What a resounding victory for conservatism!

That this is the most optimistic scenario we can imagine should be a wake-up call to conservatives: If only half of the voters are willing to repudiate Obama’s economic failures, unconstitutional acts and radical redistributionist agenda, then our nation is so far down the road to serfdom that restoring constitutional liberty may well be a lost cause.

The pessimists among us believe it is too late and all we can do is hold ground and hope for a miracle. The optimists think we can still reverse course and restore constitutional principles if about a dozen very difficult tasks are accomplished during Romney’s first term.

The root of the political problem for constitutional liberty is, of course, the cultural meltdown we have experienced since the 1960s. Our nation is now divided between people who celebrate the traditional values of American individualism, personal responsibility, free enterprise and limited government, and those who champion the values of collective action and “social justice.” This November’s election will tell us how far this culture of entitlement has spread.

The political dilemma for those of us who cherish America’s heritage of ordered liberty is that our party, the GOP, seems wedded to a mindset that must be called a strategic myopia. The Republican establishment is content to slow the growth of government, but has no plan to reverse it — because it has swallowed the leftist, historicist propaganda that the trend cannot be reversed. Thus, it not only has no strategy for downsizing government, it has no desire to develop a strategy.

Conservatives see this Republican game plan as fatally flawed — all defense and no offense. This has been painfully illustrated over the past two years by the GOP House’s struggle to significantly cut federal spending.

What’s more, conservative Republicans and tea party patriots have reason to worry about the resolve and adequacy of the Romney team. If Romney wins, conservatives must make sure that his administration doesn’t ignore the issues that are essential to reversing our nation’s downward spiral of decline. The policy goals of a serious conservative agenda would look beyond tax policy and spending control to institutional reforms designed to change the political dynamics of the next decade. Some of those reforms will sound radical, but no more radical than what Obama has in mind for his second term. The difference is this: While Obama’s team is serious about transforming America, the GOP is not yet serious about returning our institutions to their constitutional moorings.

Too many Republican leaders and pundit-strategists want to forget that the tea party came into existence and prospered because of a vacuum in Republican strategic ambitions. Halting the growth of the national debt and setting a definite deadline for balancing the budget are policy goals that were forced on the House Republican leadership by organized grassroots pressure. Even today, those goals are disparaged and undermined by the Republican Party’s Beltway consultants and professional pundits, just as they continue to downplay border security and immigration enforcement despite those issues’ persistent popularity.

(CNSNews.com) - The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) predicts that if tax rates rise in 2013 as scheduled, the economy will fall back into recession, shrinking by 0.5 percent in 2013.

CBO made the prediction in its annual summer budget update Wednesday.

“But the sharp increases in federal taxes and reductions in federal spending that are scheduled under current law to begin in calendar year 2013 are likely to interrupt the recent economic progress,” CBO said.

“By CBO’s estimate, that fiscal tightening will probably lead to a recession in 2013 and to an unemployment rate that remains above 8 percent through 2014.”

While CBO included mandatory spending cuts from the federal budget sequester (the “fiscal cliff”) in its analysis, the vast majority of the impact to the economy will come from the tax increases – the expiration of the Bush tax cuts -- due to their sheer size.

CBO estimated that the combination of spending cuts and tax increases would reduce the federal deficit by $487 billion in fiscal 2013, with the vast majority of that figure coming from tax increases.

CBO projects that if current tax policies are kept in place and do not expire in 2013 as scheduled, revenues would be $5 trillion less between 2012 and 2022.

Since the 2008 election, American conservatism has been in a struggle to define itself. Now the selection of Paul Ryan as Mitt Romney's vice presidential candidate is helping to resolve that struggle.

For years, the political left has tagged conservatives as out-of-touch anarcho-capitalists, all while enjoying a Republican party that, in reality, has demanded little more than a marginally more efficient administration of the welfare state than what the Democrats want. Conservatives have tried in vain to find a voice that refutes both caricature and reality.

Now, Paul Ryan has found what may be the right approach, and Mitt Romney has installed it at the center of the Republican party before it is too late to save the country from a European-style debt crisis.

“Ryanism” celebrates private entrepreneurship, demands lower taxation, and is willing to take on the hard issues of structural reform to programs, including out of control entitlement spending. It seeks to protect the social safety net by limiting it to the truly indigent and not to allow it to become a source of middle class entitlement (as it has over the last few decades). It does not "end Medicare," but rather makes changes to the system for those under age 55 so the program is solvent and does not rob our children. It is unashamed of America's powerful position in the world and recognizes that military spending is—when pursued prudently and not wastefully—a public good and not just another government boondoggle.

In other words, the Ryan approach is conservative and, very likely, workable. That is why it is so feared and loathed by the left.

In the 2008 general election, Sen. Barack Obama was an inspiration to many Granite Staters who had grown disillusioned with the Republican Party politics of the George W. Bush era. Four years later, many of the voters who turned to Obama with hope in their hearts have felt that hope turn once again into disillusionment.

The poll data bear this out. As the University of New Hampshire’s Granite State Poll shows, President Obama’s lead in New Hampshire has fallen from 10 points in January to three points this month. That trend was noted in a Monday New York Times story that contained an interview with a New Hampshire woman named Dawn who expressed very well the disappointment of so many Obama voters, like herself, in this state.

“Obama is not on my real popular list,” she said. “I think Obamacare is ridiculous. A lot of things that were based on good intentions get messed up.”

She added, “Obama is not off the hook with me. Do I think it’s wise to spend tons of money on stimuluses and stimuluses? No.”

Dawn is no Republican stalwart. She voted for Obama because she believed he would fix the things he said he would fix. He promised pragmatism, not politics as usual. Now she sees, as do so many others, that the promises were empty.

A Gallup poll released on Monday showed that 56 percent of swing-state voters in this year’s presidential election say they are not better off than they were four years ago. A majority, 52 percent, said President Obama has not “done as well as could be expected when dealing with the economy.” The poll covered 12 swing states, including New Hampshire.

Last week’s near-massacre at the Family Research Council (FRC) put into sharp relief a curious fact: The people most aggressively denouncing others for their “hatemongering” sure are engaging in a lot of it themselves – with dangerous, and potentially lethal, repercussions.

Take, for example, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). Back in the heyday of the civil rights movement, the SPLC helped counter the Ku Klux Klan and other racists and anti-Semites. At the moment, though, the SPLC is hanging out with today’s counterpart to the KKK and the preeminent threat to civil rights – especially those of women – in America: Islamists bent on insinuating here their anti-constitutional, misogynistic and supremacist doctrine known as shariah.

A case in point occurred last Wednesday night, just hours after a gunman named Floyd Lee Corkins entered the headquarters of the FRC. Corkins apparently was bent on killing as many of the Center’s employees as possible, perhaps because of the social conservative group’s listing (along with this columnist and a number of others) earlier this year by the SPLC as among the worst hate groups and bigots in America.

It turns out that, as with the Family Research Council, what seems to qualify one for smearing by the Southern Poverty Law Center is disagreement with its political agenda.

If you lawfully object to, say, the erosion of traditional marriage or open borders, you stand to be condemned by the SPLC as a hater. It seems that if you are militantly in favor of the radical homosexual agenda or racist groups like La Raza, however, you get a pass from that organization.